8 replies to this topic

[Skyline Jill]

First of all, just came back from Jill's conference in Tampa and I feel so EMPOWERED. I haven't been home even 24 hours and I am applying some of Jill's techniques. Here is the dilemna.

We are a 1 year old web design and SEO company. Our audience/client is mainly in Cincinnati, Ohio. To go after terms like "web site design" and "web site designer" is far to competitive and general in our gut instinct. therfore, we find it in our interest to go after "Cincinnati Web Site Design" and "Cincinnati Web site designer". However, there are no or low measurable stats in Overture and Wordtracker...(not a good sign).

We are completely happy to do business in our backyard and really enjoy the face to face contact.

-How can I go about finding keyphrase data specific to Cincinnati related to web design and seo services?

-Also do I include Cincinnati in front of each of these more general keyphrases or do I vary it and hope that we might get ranked also with the more general terms.

[awall19]

The facts that there are no measureable overture clicks might just mean that there are no advertisers for those terms

Another good keyword tool is wordtracker. It gathers data from a couple popular meta search engines and approximates overall web traffic from there. I would never say that a phrase like that is too competitive. It may be too competitive off the start, but over time you can get there.

doing regional based ads is a good idea. I actually have started listing well for "search engine marketing" even though I thought it would be too competitive. I now live in Rhode Island and just today a person who found my website wants me to do SEO for them and they live in Joliet Illinois, that is the exact town I lived in nearly 20 years ago.

its easy to start out with the regional stuff and then slowly but surely the more general terms will fall in line

[Scottie]

Hi Jill!

Glad you joined up! Good to see you here and great to meet you yesterday.

Look again at Overture:

Searches done in September 2003
Count Search Term
471 cincinnati web design
300 business cincinnati site web
181 cincinnati theater web
159 cincinnati web development
156 cincinnati web site designer
148 cincinnati web programmer
147 cincinnati web site company
145 cincinnati web developer
130 cincinnati web master
118 cincinnati in master web
90 cincinnati web cam
85 web site design cincinnati
55 cincinnati bengals web site
52 cincinnati web hosting
43 cincinnati site university web
41 web design in cincinnati
38 cincinnati public school site web
29 cincinnati mail road runner web
28 cincinnati red web site
26 cincinnati ohio web design
26 cincinnati web designer
25 web hosting in cincinnati
25 cincinnati web site

Start with a broad term and see what it pulls up. That search was for Cincinnati Web.

[Scottie]

Adding your contact info (address) to the footer of every page is a good way to optimize for "local" keywords in addition to using them in the title, headings, and on the content of the page.

[Ron Carnell]

When searching regionally, I very rarely specify cities.

For most of my adult life, I lived in Southern California. I didn't buy my groceries in the same city where I had my car repaired, and neither were done in the city where I lived, though both were within ten miles of my house. City simply wasn't a concept that worked well in a large metropolitan area.

When I retired and moved to Michigan, I took up residence in a small village. I never search on the Internet for anything in that village because, if it exists at all, I can probably see it from my front porch. The nearest city to me depends on the direction you want to drive, and an extra five or ten or even twenty miles just doesn't seem like a big deal.

Until Google understands "close to me," I'll probably continue to search on state rather than city. Assuming there are two or three others like me, using the full name of your state, rather than the two-letter postal code, might make sense?

[Skyline Jill]

Point well taken on the Cincinnati verses Ohio thought.

I am feeling daring, thanks Awall19, and going after the non-region specific terms. I am taking the advice of Scottie and getting the regional information included by placing it in the contact area at the base of each page and including it in some quotes that I am pursuing from some of my local clients and placing it in a link. Hopefully this 3 or 4 places for the page will be heavy enough.

[crendogal]

Well, since my two-letter state abbreviation is either a stop word or a boolean command (OR), I'm stuck using "Oregon" for the most part.

I think in many geographic areas the use of regional nicknames (like "Silicon Valley" or "wine country") works better in the SEs than city names, especially if your city name is more famous on the other coast (I live in the non-witch trial Salem).

As an ex-Californian, I know what you mean about the city concept not working. I used to live within 10 minutes of at least 5 different cities, and the only time I thought of the city name was if I had to snail mail something. I usually had no idea if the stores I frequented were in Palo Alto, Los Altos, or Mountain View (and in fact there were three shopping centers at one intersection where each mall was in a different city, so no wonder I couldn't figure it out).

You know, the mileage and zipcode concepts of regionalizing don't work that well for areas with lots of freeways, either, since something 5 miles away by freeway may be a 45 minute drive during rush hour and you might prefer to drive 15 non-freeway miles in 20 minutes instead -- but how would a search engine know both that it's rush hour and that you prefer not to sit in traffic?

(First posting...hi everyone!)

[Scottie]

Welcome Tamra! Glad to have you aboard.

Having lived in Cinci a while, I think you are safe to optimize for Cincinnati and all its misspellings, Jill. I doubt anyone is searching for Delhi or Fairfield web design... but you never know!

[Jill]

Welcome, crendogal!

Jill